


move my way

by Anonymous



Category: Fifth Harmony (Band), The Vamps (UK Band)
Genre: F/M, the third main character is food tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-19
Updated: 2014-08-19
Packaged: 2018-02-13 20:38:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2164410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It's about time I introduced you to a true English Breakfast." His hand does a dumb flourish over the food. "Eggs, sausages, tomatoes, beans, and of course, bacon."</p><p>When he sets the paper plate in front of her, with a napkin in his pocket, how cute, she's surprised. Who knew he was such a gentleman?</p><p>She pretends that's why she's smiling so wide.</p>
            </blockquote>





	move my way

There's a story that Brad knows about a bird that is dying of thirst. In the story the bird sees a beautiful painting of a bubbling stream, and throws itself through the air at its coolness. Of course, it dies, because the water was never there.  
  
The point, of course, is that you can't throw yourself too hard at anything, no matter how much you want it. The point is that it may have never been there in the first place. The point, he thinks, is that it can kill you when you want something too bad.  
  
And he wants Lauren.  
  
There are girls who love him and reach for his body screaming, terrifying him just a little bit less each time, but still fucking scary. If it's fucked up to like someone for the way they don't care about you... well, she makes it an art.  
  
When he pushes his hair back, she doesn't even lift her eyes from her phone, and he studies the skin of her eyelids with something bordering on obsession. When she pushes her fingers through her own hair, some part of him tightens up. When he jokes with her, she laughs along with him, enjoying his presence but never in awe of him.  
  
Which is good. Because to be totally honest, he's sick of girls who think he never cuts himself shaving or forgets to open a door for someone or gets too drunk and pukes on everything.  
  
He's found out that she's often grumpy in the mornings, but when he makes her laugh, her whole face lights up and her buck teeth look nice. He almost tells her a few times that he really likes the look of her in green, but he keeps on wimping out. He sees on twitter that she's just got out of a relationship. The hardest line is the one between friend and more, and from this side of it he can't tell if the other opportunity is even there.  
  
+  
  
"I hate everyone." Brad flops onto the leather couch next to Lauren, landing on her book and squashing the pages back. She can see them under his ass, and she cringes inwardly, but decides to bite.  
  
"Everyone who?" He'd seemed to love everyone ever since they'd got here, and it's only been four days but she had a general idea of him as a happy guy. Not someone who hated everyone. And yet...  
  
"Everyone everyone!" He frowns and reaches under him, pulling out her ruined book. "Oh, sorry, supergirl."  
  
She laughs. He'd come up with 'supergirl' because of her snapback and he'd ocassionally bring it out. "Why do you hate everyone?"  
  
"I dunno... it's their accents. Too American. Every time someone says my name it sounds different and I remember I'm in a different country. Makes me miss home."  
  
"Oh." She wonders why he's telling her, but maybe he felt like they should bond. The nine of them had been hanging, but this was the first time he'd ever really sought her out. Still, she isn't going to fucking melt over it, and instead points out that _she_ is American.  
  
He shrugs. "Your voice is different. Hey, do you want to swap iPods? I need some new music. Do you like John Mayer?"  
  
Half an hour later the other boys find them on the couch and Camila joins in when she walks past the doorway and sees they're having a little dance party to remixes of Banks. It's nice.  
  
+  
  
They're in Las Vegas and she's a bitch with her mouth in a line, because it's nine fucking AM and she's managed to be made up and blown out for interviews for two damn hours already without being allowed to find some breakfast or meet up with her parents.  
  
She sees Brad in catering after she goes to the dressing room to get out her new gray jean jacket to match her gray mood, and he looks even more tired than her. Good.  
  
He's got a second plate and loading the bacon on it for her because he broke her iPod case when he dropped it trying to change a track and dance at the same time, and now he's her slave for a week. At least, that's what he promised, but she knows they've both got a lot of press starting today, and she's sure all she's going to get for her expensive-ass case is eggs and bacon.  
  
"It's about time I introduced you to a true English Breakfast." His hand does a dumb flourish over the food. "Eggs, sausages, tomatoes, beans, and of course, bacon."  
  
When he sets the paper plate in front of her, with a napkin in his pocket, _how cute_ , she's surprised. Who knew he was such a gentleman?  
  
She pretends that's why she's smiling so wide.  
  
+  
  
In Colorado, his first post-concert bowl is in the back of his band's dressing room, which Big Rob is guarding. They're only hanging out because they've both pulled the shortest straws with their bandmates and have to wait to shower last, fourth and fifth respectively, and with like thirty minutes to kill, the best thing to do is hang out.  
  
"Second best, actually," Lauren asserts, her thumb in the bowl to prevent anything falling out as he crumbles hash. She moves her thumb so he can sprinkle it on top, and his hands brush hers. "The best thing to do would be going somewhere I can't smell you."  
  
"That's the animal magnetism of my sweat," he insists, waggling his eyebrows, as he always does, "You're the one who called me a rockstar, remember?"  
  
She grins at him and Brad rubs her hand with his thumb and she looks down to see that he's rubbing some of the hash off her finger. She pulls her hand away and reaches into his jean jacket pocket. He looks down his nose interestedly, but she's only retrieving a lighter.  
  
They smoke with a spare seat between them and Brad singing softly, under his breath, the dirtiest songs he knows.  
  
He sits around as she Bedazzles her new bong, picks out the crystals to hand to her. He's quiet, which makes her slightly nervous, but they're surrounded by sour diesel kush and sour patch kids, both regular and watermelon. He's playing bluegrass and Bob Dylan songs on his Pandora that make her head hurt in a good way. She's trying to convince him to fetch her chili dogs from catering and playing with the string of her blue zip-up hoodie.  
  
"Stop making that face," she says with a giggle, Brad hearing it like white noise and a migraine. Liking her so much stresses him out, being so near to her makes him nearly have a panic attack every time she looks at him a little too keenly.  
  
He makes his face even weirder-looking and stares her down. "My mouth is sour."  
  
"No shit." She smiles sarcastically at him and he smiles right back. Something between them flickers like a light.  
  
He stares her down again, and she suddenly feels the suppressed fear and hope like her country's first rockets are going up inside of her, and she's as certain as crowds of witnesses that they are lurching toward something.  
  
Later, when she gets out of the shower, a chili dog is waiting on her dressing room table.  
  
+  
  
Before she notices, James and Conner and Dinah have winked at her, Dinah the most obviously. She was a little embarrassed by it, and for Brad as well, considering that everybody seems to have noticed the long, slow blushes that went with any eye contact.  
  
Brad never brings it up seriously, though, and soon she becomes so used to having him by her side when she hangs out with the boys that they are just closer, now, grown toward one another gradually and without any choice; Lauren considers them flirty friends. She appreciates the way that he fits into the lonely parts of her day and the disorganized parts of her life on tour, how she can always ask him a favor or laugh at his jokes.  
  
+  
  
One of the many, many, many weird things about being on tour is how it seems like time constricts, that she steps off the bus and goes into another dimension, it feels less real, almost – as if it wasn't Lauren's real life, and the time she spent hopping from city to city was an inconsequential dream.  
  
At the same time, though, sometimes it felt like an eternity until the next performance. It's the day after the TCAs and she'd been walking around the corridors of the studio, looking at the plaques on the wall, and feels for the first time in a while a hint of that teenage alienation that everyone has told her she is supposed to feel.  
  
To make things worse, it is now 3am and she's run out of Oreos because unbeknownst to her, Brad and Camila had jointly eaten her whole packet except for the last two cookies, which she assumes they had generously kept intact for her. Camila is there to take a thwack on the head with a music industry magazine for her generosity, but she won't see Brad for a few days until Toronto.  
  
 _i am so bored_  
  
Not that, of course, he limited his presence to the physical. Her phone vibrates against her hip again and she resists the urge to scowl at it.  
  
 _entertain me_  
  
Lauren leans back in her chair, trying to be subtle. Everyone is talking about the track order for the album – they probably wouldn't notice.  
  
 _In the studio. You ate all my cookies. Pls shut up._  
  
The reply is almost instantaneous.  
  
 _if ur gonna use punctuation u should know those are sentence fragments_  
  
She bites her lip, trying not to smile. Candece turns around from the sound board and says something about what was going to be on the final mix of Reflection. Lauren nods at her words.  
  
Her phone vibrates again, hidden in her hand stuck underneath her thigh. Lauren clenches her fist, fingernails digging into her palm, in an effort not to laugh. Candece raises her eyebrow and Lauren blinks innocently back and tried to look diligent, and she can't read her messages, but she keeps her phone in hand, the regular vibration enough to make her smile.  
  
The first moment she can, she rushes to the bathroom and sits in a stall. She had missed several more text messages riffing on the same theme, then a congratulations about the TCA, then an apology about the Oreos, and then _lauuuuuuuren_.  
  
 _Why did I give you my number?_ she texts. Ally is calling her from outside the bathroom, indicating a last minute recording is about to start.  
  
 _well cos u luv me_ and then _or dina gave it to me 1 of the 2_  
  
 _I'm telling her you can't spell her name._  
  
 _i can spell urs_  
  
 _Lauren only has one U in it(:_  
  
There was a long pause after that one before, finally: _i am overloaded with dirty punchlins cant cope send help_  
  
Lauren finds herself laughing in a stall in the restroom while being late for a recording session of their debut album. He is a terrible, terrible influence and a terrible human being. She tells him so, but all she receives in return is a line of cheerful looking emojis.  
  
+  
  
In Toronto, The Vamps' crew are having a belated birthday party for their camera man and Tristan in one of the empty function rooms of the venue, because they have no show tomorrow, and Brad drags along Lauren, because he insists.  
  
At first Lauren is against it, until she also drags along Normani and realizes that everyone seeing her ignoring him for her actual friend might do something about the way they're annoying her about Brad.  
  
Of course it had backfired, and Austin's friends bring a lot of people that she doesn't know very well, and Lauren finds herself on the fringes of the party with Normani, forced to witness Brad's good time.  
  
He's surrounded, as he usually is, by a half circle of people. He appears drunk as shit, because they're in Canada and everyone had brought booze for Tristan, and the mix of people around him are hanging off of his every word. He's glittering with the sweat of alcohol and summer heat, seeming as shiny as he did on every other fucking day, just in a more obvious way now.  
  
He's amused by attention, she knows, and appreciates an audience when he thinks he's being funny more than he seeks out any real fame. He's a fucking performer, down to the pack of trick magic cards she sees in his hands, and she hates that she knows that about him.  
  
"Lauren!" he crows, on spotting her pass. "Tell everyone here how you're in love with me, it's all over Twitter."  
  
"I am not," she scowls good-naturedly, sucking spilled tequila out of the sleeve of her jacket, "in love with you."  
  
"Ah yes," he said sagely, turning his mourning eyes back to the cluster of his new friends. "yet."  
  
Lauren stifles her urge to smile and stalks off.  
  
"Why are we running away?"  
  
"What?" Lauren slows down outside the dressing room so that Normani can catch her. "I need the bathroom. I'm not running."  
  
"You're runny." She levels dark, serious eyes at Lauren. "Are we seriously not going to address this crush?"  
  
A stage manager exits the bathroom, and Lauren waits for him to be gone before replying. "There is no crush. I don't have any crush. He has a crush on me."  
  
"Lies," Bradley stage-whispers behind her, and then slips into the bathroom, effectively stealing it.  
  
+  
  
So Lauren just doesn't like him like that. That's kind of acceptable. It sucks, but he can come back from it. Except that he can't seem to stop liking her, and he's feeling kind of creepy the way he always listens to the stories she tells, and always does her favours, how he's always tempted to describe her eyes to strangers.  
  
It does seem like she likes him. At least a little. She's acting the same way anyone does when they like someone...was he making things up? He's dismissed moments between them that might have been important, moments of extended eye contact or an imagined connection.  
  
 _Wishful thinking_ , he tells himself.  
  
 _Do something about it_ , something whispers back.  
  
+  
  
Whenever they're hanging out and someone says something like "it's so big" or "can that fit there?" she always looks over at Brad, but he never says "that's what she said" and she's disappointed. She guesses he's not really not that much of a bad boy like she likes to pretend. She guesses he isn't trying to seduce her, like she tells herself.  
  
In the daylight, she waits for him to be a scoundrel from the other side of the ocean, but he's actually just charming and dorky and everyone loves him. In Connecticut, when she gets back from lunch with the girls, he brings her yellow flowers, crowding out of his fist. "To match your dress..."  
  
They die pretty fast, and she tries to make herself find symbolism in that, but it feels fake. It's not like she wanted him to bring her flowers. It's not like she asked for flowers at all.  
  
It's also not that Brad is stupid. Sometimes she can feel his complexity like it's something in the room with them, and that makes his glibness even worse. The way he shrugs things off like nothing is important, or everything is equally important, and that means doing things like pulling faces at Lauren and learning magic tricks.  
  
She's walking past The Vamps' dressing room doorway with Ally when she sees him pulling a magic scarf out of a makeup girl's pants pocket. His laugh is louder and warmer than she expects, and it continues on until it's an embarrassing kind of low chuckle or guffaw and everyone is laughing too. Lauren stares at the yards of colorful fabric that are pooling between Brad's feet and the girls', tangling them where they stood, a bloom of canary yellow silk.

She's fully aware it's a fucking stupid thing to feel jealous over.  
  
+  
  
On day twenty-four of the tour, Brad's knuckles brush against hers as he tunes his guitar, and Lauren stares over his shoulder at his lap from her position on the arm of the couch. He is in just shorts and they are waiting in a dressing room for the camera crew to be ready to film their ice bucket challenge. The crotch of his shorts gives next to nothing away, but she's mildly hopeful about a wrinkle on the inside of his thigh.  
  
This is what her life has become.  
  
He's constantly distracting her, he plays the guitar and it's like being surrounded or wrapped in the best thoughts or the deepest feelings. He makes fucking beautiful, flowing tunes that go forever and rock him with his shoulders hunched down. And she feels like she's high.  
  
So she tells herself, focus, Lauren. No wasted causes.  
  
He looks up and grins at her goofily, his eyebrows waggling as he sit in place in front of her, the guitar resting carefully on his lap. Brad strums the strings and leans his chin on the headboard, his head cocked to the side as he plays random chords from his guitar.  
  
“You look so good when you play,” Lauren admits as she props her chin on her hand, blushing as she watches him. “Like, when we were on stage yesterday, you looked hot.”  
  
Brad’s eyebrows rise. “Did I now?” He laughs as Lauren wrinkles her nose. His fingers continue to play aimless tunes and Brad turns back to her, smiling lightly. “Do you want me to play something for you?”  
  
She shrugs, her fingers tracing random patterns and circles on her knee.  
  
“Do whatever you want.”  
  
Lauren rolls her eyes when he starts playing the opening chords of ‘La Bamba’, his funny giggle filling the room.  
  
“Yeah, as if you could sing that song.”  
  
“Well, I could always try,” Brad teases back, clearing his throat.  
  
Lauren laughs and pokes him with her foot to move over, so she can tip herself onto the couch, and smiles widely when Brad plays a new song, one that she’s been listening to ever since she was young.  
  
He pauses, grinning as his fingers continued to fiddle with the guitar. “Well considering your penchant for British music, I thought you’d like this.”  
  
“I do like it. I never said I didn’t.” She says as she lifts herself, sitting upright to face him again. He winks at her, dramatically bringing the guitar close to her.  
  
"I need a harmonica." He grins and then sings the next couple lines, his quiet voice a stark contrast from the original song. “ _Someone to love, somebody new,_ ” he mumbles, laughing when Lauren pokes him on the side, “ _Someone to love, someone like you._ ”  
  
Lauren smirks. “Dork.”  
  
+  
  
Lauren likes it when he holds onto her too tightly after they make out, which they do, eventually.  
  
It was probably inevitable that they'd get here, by here she means the front lounge of his tour bus and it's so awkward. The door is still open, and she half-turns to put her pizza slice behind her on the table, but he held her wrist and kissed her, and she's holding the pizza at a weird angle kind of worried about it even while he wiggles his fucking tongue.  
  
"I knew you liked me," he says gleefully.  
  
"Yeah, I used to," she says, wrinkling her nose, "What was that?"  
  
He looks shocked, and even horrified, before he sees her face, and she giggles helplessly as he tackles her. And then holds on tight.  
  
She likes it, maybe too much, when he does that, so she puts a stop to it quickly enough. Still, her pizza goes cold.  
  
+  
  
Nothing's different the next day, and they make out again in the bus at lunchtime, kneeling on the couch so that no one can see two shadows in the window, just in case. The fans have noticed they're hanging out a lot, and sometimes they take photos, so who knows what the world thinks, but Lauren's tired of caring.  
  
Things just kind of click into place after that. Her mom calls and Lauren tells her about him, and her mom says she's proud Lauren made an adult decision, whatever that means, and then talks about her Abuela's birthday, while she watches her Adult Decision eat Cap'n Crunch for lunch. She doesn't know if this'll keep going or what she wants, but when she leaves for soundcheck, on the way out of the bus she steals the Arctic Monkeys tee he'd taken off and dies laughing at his outraged face.  
  
Catering is Mexican tonight, and she's trying to eat more quesadillas than Camila, guacamole-face be damned. Brad and Tristan are also eating, continuing some conversation they started earlier about working out or shaving their balls or whatever guys talk about. She doesn't look over at him until she can smell nacho-breath and he whispers something in her ear.  
  
"I lover you."  
  
"You lover me?" she says it back, amused, and he lowers his voice even further, stupidly serious.  
  
"Yeah, it's like when you don't love someone, but you're hooking up." She nearly spits her drink laughing, and when Camila asks what's so funny he says, "How bad you're gonna lose," and joins them in their quesadilla contest.  
  
+  
  
When they go further a few days later, it takes a minute for her to process she's going to do it with a new guy, and his mouth is smaller and his tongue is bigger and they aren't supposed to be doing this, he's leaving tomorrow, but he's warm as a fire and she feels like she's been standing outside in the rain.  
  
She's on his lap on the couch in the front lounge of his tour bus, knees tucked into the back of it, her thighs pressed flush against his hips. He turns her, places her back on the cushions and she settles back by instinct as he slides down her body, pressing kisses to her chest and grazing her nipples with his teeth through her tank top.  
  
His fingers slip around because she's that wet already, wet through her panties and in the crease of her leg. It's like she can feel his knuckles and his short nails, like she can feel everything. Like she's aflame now too.  
  
His nose bumps her leg, or her leg bumps his nose, and she apologizes even as he wrestles her skirt off of her feet, and now her feet are in his face, so she puts them back on the floor, until he pushes her calves apart and drops on his knees to the floor.  
  
His breath is hot against her skin, and his nose and lips trace a line down her stomach. She tries to buck up, try to force him down, already, but his hands are firm and she can't.  
  
Her panties are removed and then his mouth is on her, warm and somehow soft, pressure building somewhere in her body as he presses his tongue against her clit.  
  
When she's arching against him, her mind working too fast to focus on anything, he grips her knees and shuts his eyes and rubs his mouth slowly, deliberately, over her most sensitive places, his cheeks scraping her just slowly enough to tease and just rough enough to burn.  
  
She bears up on his mouth, on her tiptoes with her butt in the air as he shoves her hips up with his fingertips and makes these really weird noises and hums until she comes.  
  
Her face is red and her hair is a mess and he looks up at her with dark wet eyes like a baby animal or a poet and she stares instead at how tightly he's holding her thighs. His dick twitches against her shin as he stares, and she grins so big her lip tears a little bit.  
  
+  
  
After she makes an excuse about showering and Brad leaves for soundcheck, she sits Indian style, eating a strawberry PopTart and checking her e-mail. She checks her reflection in the webcam; she looks like she's been fucked by a truck.  
  
Her phone buzzes.  
  
There's no way that his soundcheck is finished yet; but she still sees a picture of him on the screen. His smiling face, taken outside as they ate sandwiches together in Washington while the rest of them were playing football.  
  
She picks up.  
  
"Hello, Lauren?" His voice is warm, and she freezes mid-bite. Crumbs fall into her lap, but she doesn't notice.  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
"I just wanted to say, you know, I'm really glad that uh. Well, I never thought--"  
  
"Brad." She swallows a dry mouthful. He's stuttering. She didn't realize she was going to have to hurt him. He's going back home tomorrow. She can't, doesn't want to, put herself through that again. So she lies. She's good at it, because she doesn't do it often. "I don't-- I don't think you should read too much into what happened."  
  
"...oh." She can hear a guitar riffing; someone shouting through a microphone for him to get off of the phone. He keeps speaking anyway. "Listen, I know things happened fast, and I didn't want them to start like this, really, but I'm really glad--"  
  
"Yeah, me too," she says it softly and she means it, "but, you know I just got out of a relationship. The long distance thing didn't really work out. I'm not good at it. I get jealous." Her phone beeps at her and she looks quickly at the screen. "Sorry, I have to go, my mom's calling on the other line," she says, and hangs up. This isn't a romance. This was a summer fling.  
  
+  
  
Two days later, and Brad is with the guys in London to sign papers and have his hair cut shorter. The label are altering their contract, another record on the way sooner than planned. It's going to be a hit and they aren't even writing it yet. That's what they tell him as he signs papers, his beanie making his ears too warm.  
  
It's been 13 hours since she Liked a photo of his on Instagram, and he hates that he knows that. He obsesses over memories at the times when his mind slips into distracted. Give himself a moment on a stairwell, rooting through his pockets, and he'd find that he was thinking about the curve of her lip far before his fingers touched gum.  
  
Some time after they stopped denying being a thing to their respective bandmates, they stopped denying that they wanted to be. They'd kind of had sex and smoked weed and smiled till their lips cracked when cameras happened upon them.  
  
They must've fallen in like, or love, or whatever. Just a little bit. Just enough to spend all their spare time together, just enough to think it could maybe work. Not enough to try, or keep from saying goodbye.  
  
Brad stares at the rearview mirror until the lanes of traffic behind him blend into stars. It's dangerous to drive in London at night, but it's great fun to weave through the streets and out of the city. He thinks he'd have been a good taxi driver, but long silences drive him crazy. Especially not talking to her.  
  
Brad still thinks of his life as before he got famous and, more importantly, After Album. He's still in an After, like his whole life now is a post period to the one important thing that has ever happened to him. He's changing and trying to hold on to himself at the same time. But he gave up holding on to Lauren, let her chase him away and told himself the world was saner this way.  
  
Maybe it is. He certainly feels less sane than everyone else. He calls her on the Sunday night and lets it ring all the way through to voicemail.  
  
 _Hi, it's Lauren, sorry I missed your call. Leave a message...._  
  
He doesn't.  
  
+  
  
Brad isn't there every day any more, and it makes her notice life's aches and pains a little more acutely. Her toe aches when she stubs it, and she has to hang out with Austin's stupid friends, and it's not like she's useless, but when she's online and comes across the photo of them singing together, she breathes in deep and forgets to breathe out again.  
  
She refuses to text him, and she doesn't know what he's doing since he's been back. Once or twice she's lain awake at night thinking about everything but him, and thankfully, there's no way she'll run out of distractions.  
  
So that, pretty much, is that.  
  
She spends an amazing ten days. She has her nails done with Ally in Cincinnati, goes out for sushi with the all the girls in Pittsburgh, and oh yeah, they win a fucking VMA.  
  
Pop Quiz. You are: Lauren Jauregui.  
  
Do you A. ignore Bradley Simpson's perfectly respectable 2PM Sunday phone call;  
B. try to dye your hair black for the VMAs but fuck up on the ends; or  
C. buy celebratory Subway foot-longs with the girls instead of going to the after-party.  
  
The answer, if you are really Lauren Jauregui right now, is D. All of the Above. There's no reason for Brad to be calling her. She twirls her kind of still-brown hair around her fingers as she scrolls tumblr, stretching her feet out in front of her on the hotel bed. Maybe he'll call back. Maybe he'll call back and leave a message and he'll say it was something super boring like wishing her good luck, something that has nothing to do with him missing her.  
  
She doesn't even know that he misses her; she just misses him. She knows the girls know how she feels, so she tries to tactfully talk about it, but Dinah is just cackling, still on a high from the awards show, and trying to steal her phone to text him _MISS YOU BOO_. Lauren has to snatch it back quickly before she finds the recent pictures of him saved to her camera roll like some preteen fangirl, and she's deleting them as quickly as possible in shame.  
  
So she doesn't call him back, but she sticks her tongue out at Dinah, bites into her sub, and wants to.  
  
Several days later and they are somewhere in one of the Carolinas when Dinah replies to one of her tweets, a completely dumb joke about them being in Simpsonville and Lauren wishing a particular Simpson was there with her, and then it's all over fucking Twitter that they must be reuniting sooner than planned.  
  
And they're not. She literally strangles Dinah into deleting it within five minutes but the problem with being who they happen to be is that he's going to know in a few hours anyway.  
  
+  
  
Brad spends a lot of hours in his mother's kitchen mulling things over, reading the newspapers she's pulled into sections when she's done with them. She prods him about Lauren and gives him advice, tells him stories, gossip, family secrets, burns his toast. She makes him wonder why he ever left home in the first place.  
  
But then, he remembers he's always been the kind of guy who chases impossible things. Singing, for one, is something he is still surprised to have found success in. And for two, there is Lauren, although she's mostly always just been improbable.  
  
He learned quickly that she'd been burned, and he's going to have to make the first move, and prove himself, and he has no idea if this has changed since three weeks ago and no way of knowing. It takes a full morning of talking himself into it, and talking his manager into altering his flight schedule by a few days, but he takes a plane from Birmingham, England to Birmingham, Alabama with no plan in mind and ends up at the luggage claim with one bag and one guitar and a whole lot of hope.  
  
+  
  
She still won't return his calls, but Brad shows up at their tour bus as soon as it pulls in to the auditorium's parking lot.  
  
He stands by the door quietly, and she smiles at him with wide eyes as the other girls jump off the bus, giggling a greeting to him and then basically sprinting away, probably to the catering. She's missed him a lot, despite the weirdness. Despite how busy she keeps herself working. She can hear Dinah hooting and hollering in the distance and he shakes his head with a smile but Lauren lets him in, and she leans forward to give him a lingering kiss hello on the cheek.  
  
She turns away then, taking his hand and not looking into his face because that's where all the danger is. He shrugs and follows her, all the way up past the bunks and then into the back lounge, where he stands in the doorframe and she turns to face his shoulder.  
  
"Your timing is fucking perfect." Like he planned it. Or like she knew he was coming.  
  
He moves a little closer, leans against the wall nearest her. His eyes betray nothing but his shoulders are held more hunched than average. "I saw what Dinah wrote," he says mildly with a smile, sounding very British and kind of perfect.  
  
Lauren nods and blushes and tugs the sleeves of her sweater over her hands. "It's been a while. Um, I did, by the way. I did miss you."  
  
"Me too."  
  
His accent is weird to hear again, _may tow_ , but it sounds so nice to her ears that she can't listen to what he's saying rationally. Now he is trying to explain, or promising all kinds of things that she is only half focused on because she already knows how this conversation is about to end and she agrees, and she trusts him. He stops talking and looks at her.  
  
Their uneven breaths fill the little room. His hands move to her and his desperate fingers move on her like they can say words, and maybe she likes him and maybe she more than likes him, but he's with her now.  
  
+  
  
It's been a short summer this year, mainly because they've been inside venues for most of it, and the sky seems like it's always orange, even late into the night, and the humidity in the air feels like an oppressive blanket.  
  
They're sitting outside on a patch of lawn between tour buses. "It's all an illusion," he shows her, going slowly so she can see the way he palms the quarter in the first three seconds and doesn't move it afterward. "Misdirection. The trick isn't over until you're looking in the wrong place."  
  
"What if you kept going?" she asks.  
  
He sighs, looks over their legs and the grass. The trees he can see from here are going brown already, leaves getting thinner and the sun coming down over a layer of smog that looks like dust. "Then it never ends."  
  
He puts the coin down.  
  
Lauren loops her pinky through his.  
  
/FIN/

**Author's Note:**

> i have no ideaaaa usually i'm all about the girls w eachother but this came out of me i'm sorry. hope at least a few people enjoy :3


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